


Landlocked

by warriorpoet



Category: Breaking Bad
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-24
Updated: 2014-01-24
Packaged: 2018-01-09 19:41:18
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,631
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1150021
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/warriorpoet/pseuds/warriorpoet
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They go to hotels and pretend they've escaped.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Landlocked

**Author's Note:**

  * For [panademonium](https://archiveofourown.org/users/panademonium/gifts).



They go to hotels and pretend they've escaped.

At first they stay in Albuquerque, the high rise chain hotels downtown. Skyler goes on her lunch breaks, and Jesse is already there waiting. 

He kisses her, maps her body with eager hands. She tells him she has money. Money that Walt doesn't know about yet. It's too much to launder. Millions. Maybe ten million by now.

"We could get outta here," he whispers against her ear. "It'd be easy, yo. Your kids are with your sister. Everyone'd think you'd just gone crazy and left town."

"Where would we go?" she asks.

"I don't know. Away."

He holds her on crisp, clean sheets, and she tells him that once she drove up to the Four Corners and flipped a coin. It came down in Colorado, twice, like there was a magnet in the earth pulling it home.

"We could go there," she says. "Colorado. Up in the mountains."

"You shoulda listened to it," he sleepily mumbles against her chest. "Coin flips are sacred."

Skyler isn't sure what that's supposed to mean, but he's probably right.

__________

They drive in separate cars to places an hour or two out of town. Jesse flat-out refuses to go to Santa Fe, and Skyler is curious but doesn't press. There's plenty of other places out there. Santa Rosa, Espanola, Gallup. Small motels just off the main highways, the kinds of places that people on the run would stop for a moment to catch their breath.

Skyler is surprised to find that someone, somewhere, still makes paper road maps of the United States, and even more surprised to find one for sale in the lobby of a tiny motel in Cuba, New Mexico. It's probably a relic that's been sitting there, forgotten and obsolete, for at least a decade.

She slaps it down on the counter as Jesse pays cash for a room, and then spreads it out on the bed as Jesse wobbles on top of a chair trying to disable the smoke detector. 

He sits beside her and marvels at the network of roads. The interstates, the U.S. routes, the state routes, all leading elsewhere. He swipes a hand across the country, from west to east.

"We could get on the road and just not stop. Keep going back and forth. Every time we get to a fork, just pick one way and go. He'd never know where we are." He lights a cigarette and passes it to her.

Skyler tastes him on the filter and suddenly this isn't enough. This game they play. Jesse traces the lines of the map and she traces the lines of the veins in his arm and pushes him back on to the bed, on top of the map. His head spans the entirety of the Midwest as she unzips his pants and takes him in her mouth. He stops talking and thrashes between the Pacific and the Atlantic.

__________

Skyler picks him up from his house and together they push the boundaries of state lines, going further out. Farmington, Las Cruces, Tucumcari.

They talk through the long drives, making plans they'll never follow through on. They'll get fake IDs, buy a new used car every few days or so, and once they're far enough away they'll call in an anonymous tip that something suspicious is going on with Vamonos Pest. 

Skyler wants Jesse to teach her how to shoot. It makes him laugh in disbelief, but he agrees that he would do it if she really wanted to. She imagines empty soda cans lined up on a rock somewhere in the desert, Jesse's arms around her as the gun recoils and fire explodes from her hands.

They stop for gas and Skyler notices the way Jesse's eyes linger on her body when she gets out of the car and stretches. He pushes the nozzle into the tank, bites his lip and winks at her. She rolls her eyes and peels a fifty off one of the bundles from the storage unit.

There's one motel with a tropical decorating scheme, like somebody optimistically declared it an oasis once, and Jesse fucks her on bedcovers patterned with palm trees. The headboard knocks peeling turquoise paint right off the walls.

"Why do you do this?" Skyler asks. They should be leaving soon, she should make it home before dinner. But Jesse is spooning her from behind, cupping her breasts in his hands, half-hard again against her ass, and she really doesn't give a shit about going home to Walt and hate and silence. "What do you get out of it?"

"Uh, like, aside from the obvious?" 

"Yeah. Like, aside from the obvious."

"It's either this or sitting at home waiting for the cops to show up, or your dickhead husband to come kill me. I got nothing else no more. Might as well, y'know..." he trails off, pinches her nipple between his fingers.

"But why not just leave? You're so set on it. Leave town on your own. Why _me_?"

He pulls away from her, rolls onto his back with a groan. "When I was at the car wash that time? Couple days after I was at your house for dinner?"

"What about it?"

"I said 'Vamonos', and you said 'I wish'." He rubs a hand over his head and smiles. "I wanted to see if you meant it. If you really, you know... wanted to leave. If I could help you."

Skyler gets on top of him, pins his wrists above his head. "Pinkman. If you think you're trying to save me, or protect me, or some ridiculous, noble, romantic thing, you're not. You can't."

"So, what do _you_ get out of this?"

She grinds on him, brushes her lips over his jaw. "You're a good lay."

When she gets home it's almost midnight. Walt ignores her, long given up on asking where she's been.

__________

Skyler enjoys driving.

She likes the way the car swallows up the road, the way the scenery scrolls past the windows, changing quickly or staying static for miles and miles. She likes putting distance, physical, emotional, between herself and everything she leaves behind. She likes having something to focus on, something to pull herself back to whenever her mind starts to wander. She likes controlling a deadly machine, knowing that one wrong move could kill her, and Jesse, and anyone with the bad luck of being nearby. She likes believing that she's able to stay alert and keep harm from finding them. She enjoys the thrill of getting away, of doing something she knows she shouldn't. Something dangerous, but not illegal. Nothing where anybody gets hurt, not really.

She thinks she might enjoy driving with Jesse even more than she enjoys fucking him.

It's arbitrary, considering the miles they've clocked up together, considering that state lines don't mean a thing when your husband is a killer with millions of dollars. But Skyler lets out a long exhale when a sign announces they're now leaving New Mexico, and her heart beats faster.

"Yo, wait – leaving New Mexico? Is this – are we... is this it?" Jesse twists behind him as the sign whips past, then fixes his wide eyes on Skyler. "Are we doing this? Seriously?"

Another sign welcomes them to Colorful Colorado, and Skyler smiles. "I had to see what it felt like. Just once."

"So, we're not..."

"No. Not this time."

They get a room in Cortez and she slips a hand into his pants until he closes his eyes and she no longer has to stare into the depths of his disappointment. She leaves the curtains open and rides him in an armchair, looking out the window behind him. A mountain in the distance, green and gray and dusted with snow.

"Let's keep going, Sky," Jesse breathes. "Let's go."

She pulls him onto the bed and gets on top of him, staring down at his blissed-out face, his head thrown back, white walls, white sheets, a disrupted mountain of fluffy hotel pillows. They could be anywhere. They could be everywhere.

__________

Jesse sighs when a road sign welcomes them back to the Land of Enchantment.

"I can't leave my children, Jesse," Skyler says.

"But... they're living with your sister. And you know I think your brother-in-law is a total prick, but, like, DEA and all, he's gotta be able to keep 'em safe, right? Just until... you know, until it's okay for us to go back. Until we can do something to get the cops onto Mr. White."

"We have no proof. If I'm gone, Walt will take the kids back straight away. He'll figure out that we're both gone. He'll... he'll do something. He'll fabricate evidence, say that you've kidnapped or murdered me. He'll have a nationwide search going for us. We'd be all over the news. Or he'd hire somebody and track us down himself. We'd never be safe. Never. We could never stop moving."

"But we'd be _free_."

Skyler shakes her head. "That will never happen. Realistically, you know it would never work."

"Yeah." He props his elbow on the window ledge, his head on his hand. "I know."

__________

Skyler goes to the Hyatt on Tijeras on her lunch break and finds Jesse slouched on one of the couches in the lobby. He wordlessly follows her to the elevator.

She spreads the map of the United States across the bed and he fucks her from behind as she clutches at black and red lines, the interstates, the state routes. She comes with her face close to the map, she thinks she can smell Jesse's sweat soaked up in the paper, and the names of small towns and cities and places that aren't here blur and black out to nothing.


End file.
